National news in brief, 10/18

MARYVILLE — The case of a 14-year-old girl who says she was raped by an older boy from her Missouri high school and left passed out on her porch in freezing temperatures is expected to get a fresh start under a special prosecutor.

A special prosecutor will be able to launch his own investigation, interview witnesses and work independently from the local prosecutor who's faced intense scrutiny for dropping felony charges in the case last year, experts said Thursday.

The new prosecutor's final decision carries high stakes: It could settle the debate over whether Rice was right to drop the charges, or validate the accusers' outrage by pushing the case toward a trial.

The case and the publicity has shaken the small college town of Maryville, where the girl's mother, Melinda Coleman, said her family was forced to move after being harassed over the allegations. Her house in Maryville burned down while the family was trying to sell it, but a cause hasn't been determined.

New York

Defense: Employees in dark about fraud

NEW YORK — Bernard Madoff was a Wall Street rock star who charmed and deceived billionaires, celebrities, government regulators and his employees, including five of his ex-workers who are on trial on fraud charges, defense attorneys told a jury Thursday in opening statements.

Attorney Andrew Frisch said Madoff and his former finance chief — government cooperator Frank DiPascali — were "depraved and pathological," delivering millions of lies to disguise a fraud that cheated thousands of investors out of billions of dollars.

Defense lawyers described Madoff as godlike at his firm, a former Nasdaq chairman who hid his heartless, corrupt and greedy side with extraordinary generosity. They said he was a swaggering Wall Street icon, a control freak, a great liar, a genius manipulator, extremely demanding, eccentric and temperamental, private and secretive, domineering and controlling.

District of Columbia

Homeland Security chief to be named

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is calling back a trusted counterterrorism adviser from his first term by nominating former top Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson as secretary of Homeland Security.

Obama plans to announce Johnson's nomination Friday. He must be confirmed by the Senate before taking over the post most recently held by Janet Napolitano, who stepped down in August to become president of the University of California system.

As general counsel at the Defense Department during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Johnson was an aggressive advocate on a number of complex and contentious legal issues. He oversaw the escalation of the use of unmanned drone strikes, the revamping of military commissions to try terrorism suspects rather than using civilian courts and the repeal of the military's ban on openly gay service members. He also mapped out the legal defense for the American cross-border raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.